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P=NP?

There are rumors that the Traveling Salesman problem has been reduced to P. How would you react if P=NP? How will you respond to this cryptology threat? Does anyone know what would happen if the Riemann Hypothesis proved to be false?

The first impact would be that Clay[1] may have to pay one million $
...so there always will be rumors (any references?).

Second, lot's of people, among them genuine researches, claim to
have found a P solution to an NP problem. One of the more serious
ones was a paper by Plotnikov[2]. Still, the challenge is open.

Third, have a look at the wikipedia-article[3]. There are listed a couple
of consequences.

Fourth, we may not need quantum computers anymore

And fifth, almost any computational research team may profit
of such a discovery, if the solution may be applicable to their
own problem. This is crucial: in order to solve the NP problem
you need an algorithm that does not cut down one particular
NP problem, but all of them (bounded runtime by a polynomial).

In physics, for example, when you study computationally
problems involving fermions, there is a famous "fermion sign problem"[4]:
the physical signal vanishes exponentially, while the error remains
constant. Thus, available algorithms need exponential runtime.
A reduction to a polynomial time would be fantastic.

Cheers

/edit (thanks dinowuff: link corrected "vol1" -> "Vol1" while looking for a mirror, I found this page[5], which summarizes the milestones since ~1986.

The Truth

The Riemann Hypothesis is false and P=NP. I never publish this due to the fact I am a creationist and consider the “separation of church and state” meaning my research is irrelevant. I am willing to give you a prime that is off the critical line to prove this is true. I just want to see whether the scientific community could accept it.

Andrew Wiles[1] proved a while ago Fermat's last theorem.
For this so seemingly simple statement[2], another deep
mathematical conjecture (Taniyama–Shimura conjecture,
which is about elliptic curves and thus, to some extent,
also relevant as a basis for some part of cryptography.)
had to be proven. He presented his proof in a three day
session in front of renowned mathematicians - and was
accepted.

Research actually should be the search for the truth - obviously,
there are some human beings who want to define the truth and may
misuse their status - be it a famous researcher, a creationists, whatever.
The scientific community can accept everything, as long as it is
proven in a scientific way (it should resemble Aristotle's logic).